Numa festa no arraiá // At a party, at the fairgrounds
Vi dois óio (olhos) me oiá (olhar) // I saw two eyes gazing at me
Decidi no improviso // I made an improvised move
Ela me deu um sorriso // She gave me a smile
E comigo foi morá // And went to live with me

Já cansado de chorá // Already tired of crying
Eu saí a procurá // I went out in search of
A caboca que um dia // The cabocla that one day
Levô (levou) minha alegria // Took my joy away
E eu jurei de me vingá // And I swore I’d take revenge

Numa festa fui cantá// I went to sing at a fair
E a mulata tava lá // And the mulata was there
Juro por Nossa Senhora // I swear by Our Lady
Juro por Nossa Senhora // I swear by Our Lady
Que a caboca e quis matá // That I wanted to kill the cabocla

Mas fiquei sem respirá// But I was left breathless
Quando vi ela dançá// When I saw her dancing
Ela tava tão bonita // She was so lovely
Ela tava tão bonita // She was so lovely
Que esqueci de me vingá // That I forgot to take revenge

— Commentary —

Gastão Formenti featured in a Carioca magazine piece on the “double lives of several figures from the ‘radiophonic’ world” (23/11/1935). Also featured: a driver for city services, sambista Moreira da Silva.

In 1930, Gastão Formenti, alongside Carmen Miranda, became the first Brazilian singer to sign a radio contract. Electrical recording technology was introduced in Brazil in 1927, and at the dawn of the 1930s the national radio and recording industries were poised for a boom. Formenti became one of the early stars of that boom. He was a tremendously popular romantic singer that decade, specializing in “melancholy waltzes and nostalgic songs,” according to a short profile in the review Phono-Arte, the first Brazilian publication focused on music and the recording industry, in print from 1928-’31.

Formenti was born to Italian immigrants in 1894 in the interior of São Paulo, and in this song he employs the caipira (hillbilly) accent associated with that region and the countryside in general. This style, smattered with more Italian-immigrant dialect, became famous a few decades later in sambas by another rural-São-Paulo-born son of Italians, Adoniran Barbosa. I’ve italicized the words/word endings that are sung this way: “oiá” instead of “olhar”; “marvada” instead of “malvada,” for instance. Cabocla technically means someone of mixed-blood, with indigenous heritage, but also came to be used just to refer to country folk, as seems to be the case in this song.

Formenti was also an accomplished painter (as the photo above highlights), and after 1941 he began painting more and singing less, exhibiting some of his works in museums in Brazil and abroad.

José Maria Abreu and Francisco Matoso together composed dozens of tremendously popular romantic songs in the 1930s, including one of Brazil’s — and Francisco Alves‘s — all-time favorites, “Boa Noite Amor.” Such slow waltzes and romantic ballads reigned in Brazil in the 1930s; in the ’40s, they were displaced by the more easily danced samba-canção.

A long line of fervid fans forming in Cinelândia for a show by Spanish-born bandleader Xavier Cugat — largely credited with popularizing rumba and other Latin rhythms in mid-century North America — inspired Geraldo Jacques to write a samba with a nationalist tilt. Then and there, at a news stand in the square, he wrote the first verses for “Adeus, América,” which Haroldo Barbosa later helped to complete. The song pays homage to the supreme beauty and allure of Brazilian music, rebuffing such veneration of foreign music — and all things foreign.

With its 1948 release, “Adeus, América” was one of the first hits of the tremendously important vocal group Os Cariocas,which, to add a touch of irony, had been modeled after the American group the Hi-Los. With their sophisticated vocal harmonization, Os Cariocas represented a dramatic advance in the quality of vocal groups in Brazil. Several later recordings changed the original “hots” in the lyrics to “rocks”; the internet, unsurprisingly, adopted these as the official lyrics. However, at the time the song was composed, rock and roll hadn’t even truly congealed as a genre; that would only be around 1955, with Buck Ram’s “The Great Pretender” and the first hits by Chuck Berry. “Hots” in this case refers to a fast swingy style of fox-trot.

Main source for this post: A Canção no Tempo: 85 anos de música brasileira by Jairo Severiano and Zuza Homem de Mello, and conversation with Jairo Severiano.

Today I’m departing from the usual format of this blog to tell a little story I found funny about a lyric-less choro song. If any of you, my dear readers, are fans of the 1981 comedy Stripes, and happen to have watched it enough to have the soundtrack fully fixed in your memory, then maybe you’ll remember the scene backed by this tune (as my super-impressive mega-mooning friend Geoff did, calling my attention to this whole matter):

Billboard story on the 1968 Song Fest.

If you don’t remember the scene, it’s a pretty gloomy one: Bill Murray’s car has just been repossessed and, as he protests, his fresh, warm pizza slides onto the street on a dreary New York day. It’s a moment when just about anyone might start crying softly. And as it happens, Elmer Bernstein’s tune to match the moment is astonishingly similar to a Brazilian choro by just that name – “Crying softly” – from 1963. The similarity is so striking that I decided to have a look around for Bernstein-Brazil connections, and found that five years after “Chorando baixinho” was released, Bernstein came to Rio de Janeiro to be a judge for the III International Song Festival of October 1968. Perhaps the world-renowned composer heard “Chorando baixinho” and saved it for a dreary day?

Here’s “Chorando baixinho” (Abel Ferreira, 1963)

Correio da Manhã (RJ) – 8 October 1968 – lists Elmer Bernstein as the judge from the United States